In "Silent Fields" Roger Lovegrove describes how for centuries man has killed native mammals and birds on a massive scale. This was sanctioned - and indeed required - by legislation, beginning with the Vermin Act of 1532. The aim was the eradication of vermin species in order to protect increasingly scarce supplies of food. The second half of the sixteenth century saw the beginning of the "little ice age" with a series of long bitter winters from 1564-5 and in 1566 a second more comprehensive Vermin Act was passed. This placed a duty on local churchwardens to raise money and then pay out bounties for each of a long list of creatures on evidence of their being killed. This process continued until the early nineteenth century, with the Act being repealed finally in 1869.
Perhaps the most annoying thing about the book is that although it takes its scope the list of species defined as vermin in the 1566 Act, the list itself is not presented until page 82 - and then in a block of solid text, with many of the names in their original English form.
So what were these "vermin"? Among the birds were all the birds of prey, eagles, kites, ospreys, buzzards, as well as all the corvids - but also, more surprisingly green woodpeckers, kingfishers, sparrows and bullfinches. The mammalian list included pine martens, polecats, foxes, rats, badgers, hedgehogs, moles and the mustelids.
What Lovegrove has done is to review parish records in no less than 1579 parishes and build a statistical picture of what creatures were killed at different periods of time in different parts of the country. This represents about only 14% of all parishes, but it is still an extraordinary achievement. Most parish records for the period under study are in any event missing and there was little point in looking in urban parishes.
The data shows firstly that large numbers were killed, but also that in the great tradition of local government, there was wide variation between parishes in which animals were targeted. Partly this reflected the nature of the local countryside and agriculture, but much of the variation has no obvious cause and can only be put down to local idiosyncrasy.
However, this licensed killing under the Vermin Acts was by no means the end of the matter. Lovegrove also shows how the growth of estates used for game hunting, protected by a new army of gamekeepers, led to a further determined assaults on the raptors especially.
Other factors are also addressed: the enclosure movement in the eighteenth century and changes in farming methods, which materially altered the available habitats for some species. In other cases species were hunted for fur (e.g. pine martens) or for sport (e.g. perhaps surprisingly, otters). And others were subject to losses to egg hunters and trophy collectors.
The upshot of all this is that many species (e.g. wildcat, pole cat, red kite, hen harrier) were massively reduced in numbers and driven to the most remote parts of the country and some (notably sea eagle and goshawk) were completely eliminated. Lovegrove comments that it is a sad indictment of past abuse of animals that much of modern conservation is concerned with the recovery of such species. Where I live this has happily been very successful in the case of the red kite.
But this raises a key question. There is a degree of uncertainty about whether the book is about vermin or "vermin" - Lovegrove is ambivalent about whether he accepts any legitimacy for the killing he describes. For the most part his tone is of strong moral outrage: there are frequent uses of emotional words like "persecution", "slaughter" and "appalling carnage". However, the excellent sections on individual species offer a more balanced view and a concluding chapter seems to accept that control of some species is absolutely necessary. He is also well aware of the danger of applying modern concepts and standards to very different historical periods.
Overall this is an important book. It is solidly based in painstaking research, perhaps a little repetitive and maybe too detailed in parts, but it provides a comprehensive and thought-provoking account of man's relationship to wild animals.
Roger Lovegrove - Silent Fields. The long decline of a nation's wildlife. Oxford University Press, paperback edition 2008.
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